Because it is Bitter
by cleromancy
Summary: The Keyblade War has ended. The Next World has come, and it glitters with promise. But scars linger, and putting a heart back together is no easy task. Haunted by someone else's memories, Isa embarks on an inter-planetary hunt for revenge and for an identity. When he is swept up in the machinations of gods, and joined by an unlikely companion, who will he be at the journey's end?


hey y'all i'm back and i have longfic

it is highly recommended that you read "like some pitch moon" before reading this.

* * *

 _In the desert  
_ _I saw a creature, naked, bestial,  
_ _Who, squatting upon the ground,  
_ _Held his heart in his hands,  
_ _And ate of it._

 _I said, "Is it good, friend?"  
_ " _It is bitter—bitter," he answered._

* * *

 **Chapter 1: From the Land of Farther Suns, I Returned**

The day the world ended, everyone suffered the same dream. A dream of a dry place, of wind that tasted dead and screamed like the dying through miles of steel. Of piercing lights like thousands of fireflies, that could not find each other. Of ink-thick blackness that swallows night. Of a hand pierced by a sword as it strove to drive through a chest, a voice crying out, of a great wave in the waters.

But he does not dream on the day the world ends.

He dreams three nights after the world ends.

He dreams of hands.

* * *

Hands press into him, grip at his throat, press his lips into his teeth, squeeze his lungs and flex his bones to breaking. He knows this dream. He has never dreamed it, because he has not dreamed in eleven years, but he knows the hands. You can only lie there and wait to be done. The hands will have what they want, earlier or later, and the earlier it is the sooner they leave. So they press at him, smother him, press insistently into his cheeks, into his shoulder, digging sharply, into his am crunched against one side, into his hip, and it is when he realizes that this all feels less like hands than like floor that the dream breaks, and he is alive.

Awake. He is awake.

You are awake when you are done dreaming, of course. Why had he thought "alive?" Was it surprising? Was that why he'd thought it? This seems to hold water. He had been surprised to feel alive—surprised to dream, too? The dream had ended in pieces, and so did his memory. Something is surprising about dreaming and being alive. He should find out what.

He opens his eyes.

Walls. A room. An unfamiliar room with familiar elements. What presses on his right side is, of course, the floor, which feels like simple wood slats covered by a too-thin quilt. He sits up, and is rewarded for his efforts by a persistent itch beginning around the upper ribs of his left side.

Something is wrong. Something feels abnormal about this—no, something feels _normal_ about this, and that is the aberrance. This room is normal, not—

—white, not dead-white and gray in panels, the geometric patterns of a half-real half-rendered world blurring into one another. This isn't his room. His room was—a jumble of images, of lights that blend together—not this, not organic wood and stone. Nothing was organic about that world, where he had slept ten years without dreaming. Awake. Alive. He is alive, and something is strange about that.

He flexes his fingers—right hand, fine; left hand sends a needle-burst of itch and minor pain at the knuckles. His left hand—arm—no, shoulder through to upper chest—is covered in gauze. A recent healing. Cure has been spotty with him since—

He digs fingers into the gauze, peels it back. Freshly healed skin, still pink, on the back of his hand. Peels it back farther: the edge of a long scab, beginning above his wrist. A thick oval of scabbed-over tissue covering his outer forearm to the elbow… He frowns. He doesn't remember this wound.

Aside from the bandages, he doesn't appear to be wearing anything—he pushes back the sheet he was lying under to see a towel tied loosely, haphazardly around his waist. Someone else did this. Someone else moved him here, someone else's hands stripped him and put him here on this floor, hands touching him and pressing into him and it wasn't a dream because he doesn't dream anymore, hands that curled around his throat and checked his teeth and gripped his arms with needle-like nails and the dream broke into pieces and he did with it, hands in his hair—pain.

Pain. The hands in his hair are his own, and he yanks—the pain in his scalp brings his vision right again, brings his thoughts out of the white and back into the world. He can't panic. He needs to figure out where he is.

He stands up, adjusting the towel to be more secure. The room appears to be a small house or apartment. The wall he had been facing when he opened his eyes looks to be the outer wall facing outside—it has a window, and it's made from rough gray stone and solidly sealed mortar. He rubs a hand over the sanded and sealed wood floor. The interior wall has a desk covered in books; the light from the window streams against it and spills over onto the plaster wall around it like a halo. It is quiet inside; minor activity can be heard outside, a not-terribly-bustling town street. He is awake, and alive, and somewhere normal.

 **Something was wrong a minute ago, and it had escaped him** : this thought is thunderclap-sudden, and rewinds the room.

His back crawls. A sensation other than pain, and hands, something that is still happening now. He shifts his head to look at the wall again, senses on alert. His back still crawls. No—the pressure. He touches his head again. His hair is too long. That's… wrong, isn't it?

"Wha…" he begins to say, but the sound of his own voice halts him, rusty with thirst and disuse. Looking around the room again, he sees an adjacent room one step down with a single table, and to the left, half hidden by a wall, a vanity with a single oval mirror hung on the wall above it. He beelines for it, shifting the knot of his makeshift towel-skirt to his hip for less restricted movement. His legs, oddly enough, seem fine; his bare feet pad carefully over the wood floor, and then onto an area rug spread beneath the furnished sections of the main part of the house.

He looks in the mirror and sees a stranger.

No. It moves when he moves. It must be him. That's what mirrors are supposed to show.

His face is leaner than he has ever seen it; his cheekbones stand out prominently, enhanced by a slight sunkenness to his eyes. His eyes. His eyes are blue. Blue-green.

That's wrong.

No.

It's not wrong. Why would he have thought that was wrong? What did he think they were? His mind searches but no color comes into it, a grayed-out photo-negative, and his hands are shaking, his hands are shaking, he brings them up, brushes bangs from his face: grayed-out photo-negative hair, blue-gray-rain-gray that's wrong, it's wrong, he's wrong, a blacklined whited-out paint-by-numbers cutout in the middle of an oil painting, half his hair is burned away on the left side of his face and he can't remember when that happened, a patchwork collection of features cut out, cut in, cut around, cut, cut (the lines cut between his eyes, into his face) this isn't him, this is him, he doesn't know who this is, the cuts are a letter and that letter starts a word and that word is a name and that name is

pain.

A breaking sound.

He blinks. His hand. A fist. He—he punched the mirror. It's broken. It's gone. It hurts. His hand hurts. It's a hand, and it's his, and it hurts, and the pain is something real, and the realness returns him to the world.

Most of the glass, spider-shattered, remains in the frame; two or three smaller fragments have tumbled out to lie on the dresser beneath the mirror, glinting at him with hostility. One shard falls belatedly from the frame: long and thin, the length of his hand and as wide as three fingers at the base, tapering to a knife-like point.

He seizes this and feels it bite his fingers. Already a mistake—but it can't cut him any more than it already has as long as he grips it tightly enough. Blood wells between his fingers. It's a relief. Humans bleed.

He grasps, with his other hand, a length of his remaining hair, and saws at it with his makeshift blade, as close to the scalp as he can safely manage. The mirror's edge is slightly jagged and doesn't cut cleanly, but it's enough. The hair comes away as frayed as snapped rope. He drops it to the floor, the tangled strands falling in a clump, and he reaches back for another fistful, this time behind his head. It's harder to manage. He's smashed the only mirror, after all. The shard is starting to slip in his grip, and the pain just spurs him to yank tighter. Another clump of hair comes away. Another. Another.

The last offending handful of too-long hair had just come free when a new shaft of light enters the room, and his first instinct is to whirl away from it—then toward it—find the intruder—friend or foe—he shouts a wordless challenge and flings his right hand out towards the open door, mirror shard glinting where it isn't smeared with his blood—maybe he can pass it off as a real knife if he moves fast enough, and—

"Holy shit," Lea says, eyes wide, hands thrown up, a bag at his feet where it had dropped, clinking, when he flinched back. "Holy shit. Isa."

A patch of light trembles on his face; Isa twitches the shard towards the movement, and it flicks away, only to return when he twitches back to Lea's center of mass; he twitches again and then realizes the light patch is a reflection thrown by the mirror in his hand of the light coming through the doorway. Lea's eyes are frantic, roaming the room, taking in the knife-shard, Isa's hand and the blood running to his wrist, the pile of blankets in the corner, the smashed-in mirror, back to Isa, to his other hand that clutches a ragged-cut length of his unnaturally pale hair, to his face once more. The sun is high behind him and the light from outside diffuses through his hair, limning his silhouette in a soft, incandescent glow.

Lea is here.

Right, yes.

Lea is here. That makes sense.

Lea is here. He'd said, "Isa."

Isa is him.

That's right.

Isa is him, and Lea is here, and that makes sense.

"...Isa?" Lea asks, hesitating, and Isa blinks. The reality of what's going on seems to suddenly jump into clear focus: he is bleeding, he is half-naked, he is somewhere he doesn't remember being, Lea has walked in the door, he just cut all his hair off with a glass shard in the middle of all this, and the last thing he remembers is—

(you shouldn't be here)

is—

(the agonizing, rending horror of being seen)

is—

( _stand up_ )

is—

The shard tumbles from his numb fingers, bouncing against the wood of the floor with a single clear sound, spattering little drips of his blood where it had struck. "I—" he tries to say, but his voice is rusted shut, "I—it—"

"Shit, what'd you do?" Lea breathes, as a sigh of half-relief and half-consternation, breaking towards him once that silence had shattered. "What did—when—are you okay? Wh—" He reaches Isa, takes his right hand, turns it over. The cuts are already clotting, but the blood is still fresh. "What the hell were you—"

"It wasn't mine," Isa says, hoarsely. Lea takes his other hand, sees the strands of silvered hair stuck to his fingers. His eyes widen. "I—I woke up. I couldn't—remember. Clearly. And I…" His voice falters. Lea looks to the mirror. He nods.

"Okay." His voice is much softer; it's lost that frantic edge. "I get it. Okay." He lets go of Isa's hands, abruptly. "I just got a—I got some Potions, hang on—" turning to the bag he'd dropped in the doorway. "You just—jeez, Isa, you scared the crap out of me." He inhales, tries to laugh, but laughs don't shake like that. "They said—well, we tried—your arm wouldn't, uh…." Hesitant fragments of sentences jar and clink against one another like the bottles in the bag Lea now lifts from the floor.

Isa looks again at his left arm. It itches and throbs behind the gauze. "I was unconscious. The Cure spells wouldn't take correctly. I was sleeping off this wound," he supplies. He doesn't add, _You hoped_.

"Yeah," Lea says, relief evident that he had dodged the duty of further elaboration. "Yeah, so that—yeah. So I didn't, you know, expect you to be up for a while. Alone."

"You should know by now to always expect the worst," Isa says, before the rest of him catches up with what Lea had said. "Wait, 'we?'"

Lea finds what he was looking for: the round, green orb of a Potion bottle. "Aeri'sh," he says, while he clenches the rubber stop of the bottle between his molars. It comes free with a loud pop. Isa shakes his head: he doesn't know who that is. Lea spits the stop into his free hand and sets it on the table. "Kairi. Sora. Healing duty." He doesn't bother to wet a towel—he takes Isa's bloodied hand and wraps it around the Potion bottle, wound over the opening, and tilts. The citrus sting reaches his nose and the cut tingles with the numbing itch of magically enhanced healing. Potions still affect him more readily than Cure magic, although few are as efficacious as a spell would be overall. Still, it's enough to heal the cut shut. It will hurt internally for a little while longer, though.

Lea's fingers linger on Isa's for a long time. Isa suddenly realizes the proximity and jerks briefly as if to break away—Lea, reacting, drops his hand. "Sorry, I—" he begins, but Isa cuts him off.

"No," he says, rubbing his injured hand with the other. "No, it's just that I…" He trails off. "I don't remember the last time…" he admits.

"That you were touched?" Isa blinks. Lea glances toward the floor, laughs sheepishly. "I...after… When Sora woke up last year, he hugged me, and I, uh… burst into tears. It was really, uh, embarrassing." He rubs the back of his neck. "I guess it's easy to forget how important that is when you don't have a heart."

Isa stares at his hand, at the freshly scabbed cut, still tingling. He doesn't… He doesn't remember the last time his hand had been touched. Touched not in violence, anyway. He regrets flinching away, suddenly. "I guess so," he says. His voice still feels raw in his throat, as though it too had been cut. Every part of him feels raw. He wants to take Lea's hand again but now it seems too… too childish. Too vulnerable. Earlier his skin had crawled to feel more hair than he ever would have let grow out against the back of his neck, but now he misses the barrier: he feels exposed. "I guess it…." But he trails off, unsure of what he had even meant to say.

Lea glances him over and then averts his gaze again. "So…" he begins. Isa remembers this from when they were boys: he is steeling himself for an uncomfortable question. "What… what do you remember?"

He remembers…

He remembers drowning. He remembers the taste of blood in his mouth. He remembers a blank static, white like pain, black like hornets, that seems to crowd in the gaps. He remembers tearing something, something breaking. He remembers… Lea, somehow, something like a dream or a nightmare. Before that, he remembers some things, that seem to crowd before an indistinctly blank period. Trying to quantify the last thing he remembers seems as ambiguous and anxiety-inducing as trying to determine the last thing one did before blacking out from drink. "You… you went rogue. You took the princess. You were trying to… turn Sora. I think?"

His hands are trembling. He remembers a conversation. Before the canyon. He hadn't been back in the Garden since the Fall. The bare crystals, that should have been underwater, edged like knives. The reproach and shame on the Keybearer's face, when he had begged for her life. What he remembers feels foreign in his mind, old thoughts sticky with poison, a series of disconnected images and concepts and names that resist connection.

"Wait, is that what you thought?" Lea's voice breaks his reverie, lets him back into reality.

 _Is_ that what he thought? Trying to remember things feels so hard as it is; trying to remember extra layers of data feels twice as hard. His memories are mirrors suddenly broken if he gazes into them too hard. A wave of dizziness rolls through him, he presses a hand to his temple. "I think…" he says.

Lea gazes into his face. "Do you—do you want to sit down?" he asks, gesturing to the table and chairs. Isa steps over to one of the chairs and lowers himself into it. He realizes his hands are shaking. His stomach aches. His stomach…

"I'm hungry," he mumbles, not as a demand but as an observation. As a wonder. He hasn't felt hunger in years. Nobodies don't need to eat to live—already unnaturally animated by will and magic alone, physical needs like hunger and thirst vanish. (And, so he was told, sex. He was young when he lost his heart; it was an absence that he had never registered as such. Only a few of the others had ever remarked on it.) They could _choose_ to eat, but he had never seen the need to consume resources for the sentimentality of it. Maybe that was a mistake. He stares at his trembling hand. He hasn't eaten in a decade. He's alive. None of this makes sense.

A hand moves in front of his face—he flinches violently. Lea peers at him, concern evident. Isa raises his voice a little higher: "I'm hungry… It's strange."

"—Oh!" Lea says, shooting up and dashing towards the small icebox in the kitchen area. "I figured you'd want to take it easy on your stomach—it took me a few days to adjust to solid foods when I… —ah!" He's found it, whatever it is. Isa hears the crinkling of a plastic wrapper, and then:

"Here," Lea says, holding it towards him.

It's a bar of blue ice cream. Isa can see a rime of white freezer-burn crystals crusting one edge. He stares at it. It seems to look like something he's seen before, in a specific way, but he couldn't say what. Lea seems expectant, somehow, his eyes roving Isa's face for a reaction. Isa reaches up and takes it. Ice cream for his first meal, like a surgery patient. He tentatively presses it to his tongue, and the first thing he tastes after the numbing cold is—

He flinches, pulls it away at the unexpected flavor. "Salty?!" A moment later, he registers the sticky-sweet aftertaste. "No…"

Something in Lea's face shatters: he blinks, several times and quickly. "You… you don't—?" A knock at the door interrupts him. Lea whirls one hundred and eighty degrees. Muffled, through the door: _Lea? Everything okay in there?_ A young woman's voice. Isa feels like he should recognize it, but the connection is vague. Lea glances back towards him as he gets up for the door, before gingerly opening it. "Hi, Kairi…" he says.

Something in his face must have said it all, because the person on the other side doesn't let Lea finish his sentence. "Here," she says, thrusting the door all the way open and ducking in under Lea's arm, "let me—oh." Sun-kissed cheeks splattered with freckles, dark red hair hanging to under her chin on one side and plaited tight to her head on the other side in three rows, ultramarine eyes: some details about the girl seem to leap out faster than others. He knows he should know her. He _knows_ he should. It's at the tip of his tongue, but somehow, the visual memory of his eyes saying _you have seen this person before_ won't align and fuse with the corresponding memories of name and place and time.

Her eyes land on him and widen; she freezes, but only for a moment. Heat rushes to his cheeks, and he has no idea what the feeling is at all, whether anger or shame or embarrassment—it has no connection to what he's seeing. He ducks his head and, reckless, bites into the ice cream Lea had given him, almost welcoming the painful sensation in his teeth. _Crunch_. At least the cold feels good in his throat. It's gone in four bites. The stick has a message printed on it, but he doesn't read it before dropping it onto the table.

While he does this, the girl— _Kairi_ , Lea had said _Kairi_ when he answered the door, it's a name he knows but he doesn't know why he knows it—un-tenses, looks at him, looks at the floor, where the mirror shard still lies in a splatter of drying blood in between piles of hair, looks again at his right arm, which has its own drying bloodstains, and at his patchy haircut, turns and looks at the pile of blankets in the side room. Finally, after all this looking and turning and looking more, she turns entirely around to face Lea, who had shut the door and was leaning against it, and places her hands on her hips.

"Well?" she says.

Lea glances to either side, as though she might have been addressing another. "Well _what_?" he says.

"Aren't you going to introduce us?" she asks, as though this was a perfectly ordinary house-call.

"But—!" Lea's jaw actually drops. "You—but—he—"

Her eyes narrow. "Don't be rude."

Lea claps his hands together in front of his nose, as though praying, and inhales sharply. A gesture. "Kairi, meet Isa. Isa, this is Kairi. Do you remember her?"

Kairi. Red. Red hair. Blue eyes. He has a strong feeling he remembered something related to her just minutes ago, and cannot call it back to heel. A name like the sea. Sea-salt. Blue. Water. The more he thinks, the more he realizes that he woke up thinking it was just the past few days he could barely remember, but it's more. His mind is a sand sculpture: appearing whole, but crumbling as soon as he tries to touch it. Something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong with him. His hands are trembling. He presses them to his face, covers his eyes. Something about crystals, and water—"No," he whispers into his hands, and he's ashamed of it. He was almost there.

"Well, don't push yourself," says Kairi, and Isa looks up from his hands to see her shrug ruefully. "You were asleep for three days."

"Three days…?" He looks at Lea, who nods. Asleep for three days… (He had thought he was alive, when he woke up, and thought that it was strange.)

"I came here to tell Lea this, but you're awake so I'll tell you," Kairi continues. "You had some bad burns, and we had someone try to heal your arm, but apparently healing magic doesn't work well on your body—at least, that's what she said." Another glance at Lea, and then back— "A lot of stuff is going on right now and it would take a while to explain, but a Keyblade Master just arrived on this world who's way better at magic than me and Lea combined, and knows a little bit about your situation, so I said I'd ask her if she could take a look at you and heal you up any better, and she said she'd come over, so I came here to say that." She looks up, as if to check that she had missed any part of her message. "So—right. I went ahead of her to let you know, so she should be here any—"

A knock at the door: Lea, leaning against it, startles violently. "Oh, hey," Kairi says brightly.

"Wait," Isa says, with the urgent sense that he is losing more and more of the thread of the sequence of events, as Lea turns and opens the door, "wait, who's coming here?"

It's a woman, with soft blue hair and flowing sleeves that don't do well to disguise that she seems a little _too_ skinny, as if undernourished. "I don't believe we've actually ever met," she says. Her voice is gentle, and none of her mannerisms seem as guarded as Kairi's, or as suppressed-anxious as Lea's. She carries herself with the unthreatened grace that could only belong to either nobility or a warrior without peer: the lines of hard, lean muscle at her arms and shoulders suggest the latter. "My name is Master Aqua. It's been a confusing few days for everyone, so you don't need to worry about that."

"I don't…" He puts his hands down onto the table, trying to hide how much they shake. He wishes he hadn't eaten anything; his stomach seems to churn around the ice cream in it. Being the subject of only Lea's observation was unnerving, but withstandable; being the subject of Kairi and Lea's shared concern was frightening; being the subject of three people's scrutiny fills him with a dread he has no tools to articulate. "I don't understand."

"It's not—uh." She had begun to say something else but the register of her voice suddenly drops from "palliative care" to "flat confusion." "Do you—you've got—did anyone give you clothes?"

Right. He's still only wearing a towel. She must have stepped closer and seen more of him from behind the table. His glance shoots down—oh, he's still decently covered from the waist down. The gauze covering his left arm and shoulder has been partly torn away from the elbow down; that and the towel are the only coverings he has. "I don't know. I just woke up. This was all I had."

Both Master Aqua and Kairi whirl on Lea and in simultaneous, ringing voices, accuse: " _You didn't give him pants?!_ "

Lea puts his hands in the air as though he is under arrest, protesting: "I don't—I didn't mean to—I expected to be here! I left for fifteen minutes! I don't even know his size!"

"So you thought you'd be here when he woke up and you'd _take him shopping naked_?" Kairi demands, while Master Aqua, completely out of line with the tone of the day so far, begins laughing.

Lea has turned as red as his own hair—"I don't—I didn't think that far ahea— _I'm stupid, okay?!_ "

The tension drains out of Isa's shoulders for a moment. The knot in his stomach hasn't loosened, but the diversion of attention from him feels like a hand being removed from his throat.

"Listen," Master Aqua says to Kairi and Lea, "you two go back out and get him something to wear. I want to talk to him." Kairi grabs Lea by the upper arm and hustles him towards the door. Lea hesitates.

"Isa— " he says, uncertainly—

"It's okay," Isa says, his eyes on the table. They land on the ice cream stick, still half-dark where it hasn't dried. The message on it says, _Sorry, try again_. "I'll be fine."

* * *

It takes a block of them walking before Lea finally speaks. Kairi's never seen him this introspective. It's almost unnerving. "I guess it was stupid to think he'd just be okay," he says, his teeth shutting in a grimace, almost angry with himself. "Like you just walk off the fu- the freaking apocalypse, you know? Dumb."

"Don't beat yourself up for hoping for the best," Kairi says, touching his arm again. "Do you remember when we talked?" One night, and one night only, Lea had opened up to Kairi during their training about his past. About Isa. About what he was walking into, in the second Keyblade War. He hadn't otherwise liked to talk about it. "You were afraid you wouldn't survive yourself."

"Afraid?" Lea barks a harsh laugh. "I had _no_ expectations of living through that. Now I'm going on twenty-six and I never even finished high school. But—" He stops speaking, runs a hand over his eyes, down to his mouth. "He didn't remember…"

"Lea." Kairi's voice is stern, though not unkind. "Three days ago, I watched you carry him to that house and lay him down. His heart was in _pieces_." Her voice hitches. It wasn't that she wanted to intrude, but she is a Princess of Heart, and she couldn't help but sense it. It felt like shards of glass. "It's a miracle he's alive at all. A miracle _you_ enabled by being there." When Lea's expression doesn't lighten, she goes on. "I've learned some things about memories from Namine. As his heart heals, it's likely he'll be able to rechain a lot of his memories as it goes. They probably aren't _lost_ , just scattered. He remembered _you_ , didn't he?"

"Yeah…" Lea seems to return from his reverie as they walk. "Yeah, he did. He does. Huh."

"Yeah," says Kairi, with a nod that says _so there you have it_. "I mean, think about Sora. Namine only messed up some of his memories and he still had to sleep for a whole year. If he's up and talking after three days, I think your friend will recover."

"Sora had extenuating circumstances and you know it." But Lea gives her a tired smile. "—That reminds me, I forgot to ask. Have you talked to anyone who's been off-world in the past 24 hours?"

Kairi knows what this is leading up to. "Just Sora," she says, casting her eyes down. "He doesn't know where she ended up. He's connected enough to know she's alive, but… The World is big, you know?" Lea shuts his eyes and rubs at the corner of one with his hand. Kairi knows he hasn't been sleeping much. "I'm sorry, Lea," she says.

"Don't be," he mumbles. "No one owed me a happy ending." A sigh. They're almost at Market Street. "I just kinda felt like I owed one to _them_."

* * *

After Lea allowed Kairi to yank him outside, and the door had slammed behind them, Master Aqua heaves an enormous sigh. To Isa's surprise, she pulls a chair out at the table, the one Lea had sat in, and and practically collapses into it. She stretches her legs out and stares up at the ceiling. "Better?" she asks aloud, after a moment or so has passed.

He looks up from the table, then back down at his hands. "Yes," he admits.

"You looked overwhelmed." She leans forward again to sit more properly in the chair. "When I first returned from the Realm of Darkness, crowded rooms felt like nails on a chalkboard. Terra keeps flinching when Ven and I _look_ at him." She swallows suddenly at that, as if taken by surprise at the memory. "Sorry," she adds, "it's rude of me to talk about people you don't know."

The woman fascinates him: he wasn't sure of what he had expected when Kairi said there would be a Keyblade Master, but some unconscious fear had dissipated when he saw Master Aqua. If she survived some length of time in the Realm of Darkness alone, she would have to be strong in many ways. "I wish…" he begins, then stops himself. Begins again, "It seems that I've lost a lot of my memories." Hands curl shut. His right hand aches again.

Master Aqua holds up a hand. "I can tell you're scared," she says, her voice soft. "But before we talk about your memories, first, I should tell you what's happened in the last few days." When he nods, accepting her terms, she leans in and folds her hands.

"Do you remember the Keyblade War?"

* * *

first of all, enormous thanks go to my fic midwife malathyne, without whose invaluable help and service, this fic would have died in birth. i rewrote the opening chapter no fewer than three times. this fic began life as postcanon akusai waffy angsty nonsense and wound up... not that, at all. isa has to earn it :')

second of all, if you are confused about certain elements of the world after the keyblade war, don't worry: all will be revealed, in proper time...

third of all, if you like this and are eager to see more, please don't forget to comment! i haven't tried to write something with multiple chapters in nearly a decade and i need all the encouragement i can get.


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